The National Library of Medicine has released Discovering the Connection: Your Environment, Your Health, an after school science club curriculum for middle school students. The curriculum combines research on the Tox Town web site with hands-on experiments and communication, including social action activities. The objective is to introduce middle school students to environmental health issues in their everyday life, emphasizing the relevance of science to informed citizenship. The curriculum lessons can also be used to support the existing middle school science curriculum, as well as to reinforce the science/society connection in the social science or language arts classroom.

The curriculum was developed as a collaboration between the NLM, the University of Maryland College of Education, and an inter-disciplinary group of middle school teachers. It is based on National Science Education Standards, and is grounded in a problem-based learning approach that promotes in-depth understanding and critical thinking. The curriculum contains six units; each of which introduces one environmental health topic, and includes three to four 50-60 minute lessons. The units include: 1) Water Quality; 2) Air Quality; 3) Chemicals in Your Home; 4) Food Safety; 5) Runoff, Impervious Surfaces, and Smart Development; and 6) The Great Debate: Bottled Water vs. Tap Water in Our School.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Specialized Information Services (SIS) has released Especially for Toxicologists, a guide to NLM resources on environmental health, toxicology, and chemical information for toxicologists. Also announced is a new Enviro-Health Links page, Laboratory Safety, which offers links to information for clinical, academic and school laboratories, including resources for handling chemical, biological and nanotechnology safely. Also included are links to regulations and policy, hazard analysis, MSDS, waste management, and pre-formulated TOXNET and PubMed searches.

A Librarian’s Guide to NCBI comprises a pre-course, “Fundamentals in Bioinformatics and Searching,” offered online (asynchronous), during March 2013, and a five-day, in-person course offered at the National Library of Medicine, April 15-19, 2013. The course provides basic knowledge and skills for librarians interested in helping their clientele use online molecular databases and tools from the NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Topics include using the BLAST sequence similarity search and Entrez text search systems to find relevant data. The course describes the various kinds of molecular data available, and explains how these are generated and used in modern biomedical research. Instructors will be NCBI staff and Diane Rein, Ph.D., from the University at Buffalo. The course will be limited to 18 students. More information and an online application will be available in December, 2012.

The “Do Not Route To” list may be used to prevent requests from routing to individual libraries in Library Groups in a Routing Table, Resource Libraries, or “All Other Libraries;” or to temporarily prevent requests from routing to lenders listed individually in Routing Table cells.

Borrowers can prevent their requests from routing to a specific member of a Library Group in their Routing Table by adding the LIBID to the Do Not Route To list. This can be done for an individual request during the Borrow process, or with a default list of Do Not Route To LIBIDs in the Borrowing Preferences, Serial Routing section of the Institution record.

Note: No more than 20 LIBIDs are allowed on this list. Users wanting to permanently prevent requests from routing to libraries listed individually in their Routing Instructions should remove the LIBIDs from their Routing Table or M/A/N Map rather than using the Do Not Route To feature.

To learn more about how DOCLINE routing works, go to the FAQ DOCLINE page. If you have any questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-800-338-7657 or e-mail us at psr-nnlm@library.ucla.edu!

The National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center and Montana State University’s Center for Native Health Partnerships have published a new resource, Walk Softly and Listen Carefully: Building Research Relationships with Tribal Communities. A PDF version of the document is available for downloading. This new resource was developed with insights from those involved with tribal research in Montana and elsewhere.

Increasingly, tribal leaders acknowledge that research is a key tool of tribal sovereignty in providing data and information to guide community planning, cross-community coordination, and program and policy development. Efforts to address longstanding issues, such as health disparities for American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN), have increasingly used partnership research approaches. This document seeks to strengthen these partnerships by providing insight about how culture, sovereignty, and experience matter in research with Native communities.

The National Library of Medicine has released two new resources for the study of mental health history: the papers of Louis Sokoloff (b. 1921), a noted neurochemical researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and an updated online Guide to Mental Health Motion Pictures. From 1957 until his retirement more than 40 years later, Dr. Sokoloff served as Chief of Cerebral Metabolism at the NIMH. In 1981 he won the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Research for developing methods of measuring metabolic activity that led to development of positron-emission tomography for the brain. The Sokoloff collection comprises materials from 1953 to 2004. In addition to laboratory notebooks and drafts of articles, the collection is particularly noteworthy for the radiographs that Dr. Sokoloff used as part of the development of his imaging techniques. A finding aid to the Sokoloff collection is available.

NLM’s updated, online Guide to Mental Health Motion Pictures provides information covering over 200 films and video recordings produced from the 1930s through 1970, including links from each title to NLM’s catalog record. The films show the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders as defined at the time they were made. The productions range from ideological, documentary, educational, and training films to military-produced titles explaining the psychological impact of war. The therapies shown range widely, from insulin-shock and electroconvulsive therapies and surgical approaches such as lobotomy, to the mid-twentieth-century revolution in pharmaceutical intervention. The films also document the therapeutic shift towards community-based mental health. The Guide joins previous NLM subject guides to films, notably the Guide to Tropical Disease Motion Pictures and Audiovisuals (2009), and the National Library of Medicine’s Motion Pictures and Videocassettes about the Public Health Service and Its Agencies (1998). NLM’s audiovisual collection includes over 30,000 titles and is the foremost medical film archive in the world.

NIH’s public access policy ensures that the results of NIH-funded research are accessible to everyone, for the benefit of advancing science and improving human health. On a typical weekday, over 700,000 users retrieve more than 1.5 million papers on PubMed Central (PMC), the host archive for the public access policy. Since the policy was implemented in 2008, much attention has focused on outreach to the grantee community. This strategy, along with the research community’s shared commitment to making public the results of NIH-supported research, has resulted in a high level of compliance. However, public access is a statutory requirement, and improved compliance is still needed.

New guidelines (NOT-OD-12-160) have been issued, announcing that in spring 2013, at the earliest, NIH will delay processing of non-competing continuation grant awards, if publications arising from that award are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy. Once publications are in compliance, awards will go forward. This change will take effect in tandem with NIH requiring the use of the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPRs) for all Streamlined Non-competing Award Process (SNAP) and Fellowship awards, also in the spring of 2013.

These changes are being announced several months in advance of implementation, to give awardees as much time as possible to comply with the policy. Awardees should be strongly encouraged to comply with the public access policy. Recent enhancements to My NCBI allow awardees to associate papers with their awards, and track public access compliance. Additional helpful resources, including frequently asked questions about the public access policy, are available on the web site.

The Fall 2012 issue of NIH MedlinePlus the Magazine is available online. NIH MedlinePlus the Magazine is the free, trusted consumer guide to the vast array of authoritative online health and medical information at MedlinePlus. Published four times a year, the magazine showcases the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) latest medical research and healthcare information. In this issue:

NIH Research: Dr. Anthony Fauci—Turning the Tide Against AIDS

Steady Advances in Cystic Fibrosis Research

Steady Advances Against Cystic Fibrosis

Cystic Fibrosis: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment

Living with CF

Cystic Fibrosis Research

Diabetes Complications

Learning A Healthier Way to Live

Preventing and Managing Diabetes Complications

Personal Stories

Tailoring Diabetes Treatment to the Patient

Time to Get Your Annual Flu Shot

Electronic Health Records: Permanent, Private and Informative

Back to School, the Healthy Way

Check-Ups and Immunizations

Exercise and Sleep

10 Healthy Breakfast and Lunch Tips

Finding Answers In A Beauty Shop

NIH MedlinePlus the Magazine is freely available both online and in print.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the release of a new educational resource, an afterschool science club curriculum for middle school students, entitled Discovering the Connection: Your Environment, Your Health. Lessons and activities of the curriculum combine research on the Tox Town website with hands-on experiments and communication and social action activities. The objective is to introduce middle school students to environmental health issues in their everyday life, emphasizing the relevance of science to informed citizenship.

The curriculum was developed as collaboration between NLM, University of Maryland College of Education, and an inter-disciplinary group of middle school teachers. It is based on National Science Education Standards and is grounded in problem-based learning approach that promotes in-depth understanding and critical thinking.

The curriculum sequence contains six units that each introduce one environmental health topic and include three to four 50-60 minute lessons. The units are: 1) Water Quality, 2) Air Quality, 3) Chemicals in Your Home, 4) Food Safety, 5) Runoff, Impervious Surfaces, and Smart Development, and 6) The Great Debate: Bottled Water vs. Tap Water in Our School. While the curriculum is for an afterschool club, its lessons can also be used to support the existing middle school science curriculum, as well as to reinforce the science/society connection in the social science or language arts classroom.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a Web content collecting initiative. The Library is selecting Web content as part of its mission to collect, preserve, and make accessible the scholarly biomedical literature, as well as resources that illustrate a diversity of philosophical and cultural perspectives not found in the technical literature. New forms of publication on the Web, such as blogs authored by doctors and patients, illuminate health care thought and practice in the 21st century. In launching this initiative, the Library is capturing and providing a unique resource for future scholarship.

The Library’s inaugural collection of Web content is “Health and Medicine Blogs,” presenting the perspectives of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators and other individuals in health care fields. The collection also includes patients chronicling their experiences with conditions such as cancer, diabetes and arthritis. The site currently contains 12 blogs, including KevinMD.com, “social media’s leading physician voice;” Not Running a Hospital, a blog by a former CEO of a large Boston hospital; e-patient Dave, a cancer survivor and leader in the participatory medicine movement; and Wheelchair Kamikaze, who writes about his personal experience living with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Guided by the NLM Collection Development Manual and other strategic collecting efforts, NLM will continue to expand its capacity to collect Web content. With this initiative NLM has taken a major new step in its mission to collect pertinent health care information of today for the benefit of research in the future. Increasingly, that information is found on the Web, which is a rapidly changing environment, where valuable and interesting materials can surface and then quickly disappear. The Library is working to ensure it can effectively collect new material in a Web environment, and guarantee the material’s permanence and availability to current and future patrons.

In launching this initiative, NLM joins many other national, state and public libraries and archives that have acknowledged the importance of preserving Web content for future generations. In addition to the Internet Archive, which has been broadly archiving the Web since 1996, dozens of libraries and cultural heritage institutions have been engaged in thematic or event-based collecting. This community has contributed to the development and use of common tools, techniques, and standards that enable the creation of Web archives. NLM has benefitted from this work and from local partners such as the Library of Congress, which is actively engaged in collecting and preserving Web content. The NLM has already been archiving portions of its own Web domain considered to be of enduring value. With this new effort, the Library is now collecting Web content that others have created.